


Confusions of Fireflies

by gogollescent



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/F, Memory Alteration
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-01-19 09:30:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1464352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I can do it,” Historia said. “It won’t take long. And after you’ll be free.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My bottomless appetite for SNK futurefic summons up its most self-indulgent answer yet! Or: Ymir the Butch, Friendly Giant and King Historia reunite. With a _few_ complications.

It wasn't like she didn't know who they were taking her to see. Eren, directing construction from atop the brand-new Wall Carla—little Titans making glassy dog-piles, a hundred feet below his vantage point—told her everything about what Historia had been talked into, though he told it with a distraction that could be felt even above the trademark intensity of his sky-silvered stare. When he'd first seen Ymir, that had been one thing. His attention had been total, if largely incoherent. But once the shock was over with—absorbed as completely as if his mind, like his changed body, would never suffer itself to bruise—he spoke in a voice whose apologetic burr fell miles shy of fury. She wouldn't have believed it, but the signs were under her nose: having lived to eighteen, he'd grown up. He let the patrol squad dump her back in the wagon after ten minutes' recapitulation with barely a death threat to their leader. Mikasa, coming up behind him with cropped hair and new scarlet darns on the scarf, had said, “You've become lucky, Ymir”—like they had ever been on diagnostic terms before.

But it was what everyone told her. “You're in luck, Dancing Titan,” said the little captain with a frown; in three years she'd forgotten his name, if not his Byzantine grace, the stop-and-start of dense efficiency. “She won't even let us interrogate you. _Executive order_ : first dibs to the king.” He signed the transfer papers that would deliver Ymir into the hands of the MP, his pen moving for a surprisingly long time. She hadn't thought he'd be the type to have a last name. Or to know how to write.

The hell of it was, she'd have been happy to talk. If they'd asked, or stood still long enough. She would have spilled her guts, what she had left of them. The whole thrilling escape, theirs for the price of removing the muzzle. She hadn't had mouth or hands free since a squad netted her outside Carla. At which time she had heard them argue seriously, their voices muffled by the fog of intercedent flesh, about whether to free her from her cocoon of nerves and live in fear of future enlargement, or leave her in gross Titan-shape and rely on what security stakes and rope mesh could offer. She could have told them—but she was grateful, in the end, that they had decided to spare their horses and bring back the human kernel: the greater part of her flesh left split, steaming, jewel-bright as a grapefruit in the sun. She was grateful for the muzzle. She was grateful for her hemp-wrapped manacles, designed so that the wearer could never cut themselves on iron. Pathetic, but she would have done and hoped for worse, if it meant not returning to Historia in the oversized nude; not saying words of three years' dreaming with a mouth best-formed for regicide.

Oh, yes. First dibs to the king.

Still, it would have been nice if they'd taken the gag off now and then to feed her. She had thought they might, before she remembered that she was a Titan, and they'd had time to learn what Titans did other than kill. The sun on the side of her face, as she lay curled in one corner of their cart: eyes closed, body shuddering, fear and its vibrations outclassed by a wheel dragged over some rocks. The mammoth gear of this uneven world, locking cogs with her too-meager frame. Sending quakes, revolutions, from her edges inward to her heart. They had taught her the workings of the 3DMG, so long ago, with charts and wooden models. Shadis himself had explained the axles: how the centers at least remained still. Although, on a wagon, even the hubcaps were moving. Just forward: onward, steady, a straight shot above the earth.

“You're a lucky bitch,” said the guard sitting on the supply boxes at the front of the cart. He sounded tired but happy. There might have been a note of humor, certainly a note of pride. When she opened her eyes he was looking at the horses, and beyond them to the road north; like her, was thinking of the center, and his unaltered home.

 

Historia was on her throne.

She's cut her hair, was Ymir's thought on entering: first, dizzy, idiot thought, the thin white figure in deep gloom like a salt lure to the nose of a stag. She was serious-faced, cloaked in black velvet, a chain of uncut gemstones hanging taut around her neck. The crown sat forward, hard on her brow. White gold turned by hair and skin's proximity to brass. She had a stand for her feet, which would otherwise have dangled above the uppermost step. Her expression had morphed rapidly from austerity through horror.

Except you couldn't tell if the last was repulsion or rage. In the moment of change you knew the difference, but at its end you were only afraid.

“Remove her restraints,” said the king, so shortly Ymir struggled to hear. The guards did not. Several advisors from around the throne's steps spoke up in a reflexive babble of protest, and the highest-ranking MP soldier present—Marlowe, she thought his name was, stupid hair—looked suicidally tempted to join in. But Historia said: “Leave the cuffs. She can't bite her wrists behind her back. And—” Feigned hesitation, probably. “If she tries to bite anything else, you can always hold her head.”

Like Ymir was one of the spies, always thinking in last-hope ways to harm themselves _enough_. Tooth and ring. Did it escape the crowd that when she'd been honest at Utgard, she'd done it with a knife, like a civilized tool-user?

Okay. Very likely yes. And she'd learned to be more inventive, in her time away. But the roof would constrict even her compact Titan, and—

It didn't matter. Off came the leather cup, the stinking straps. She lifted her face from their unwilling hands and resisted an abrupt urge to spit benevolently. Death to the human cancer, you'll never break us! If that was, perhaps, what at least a few in the anteroom were expecting, it would have been kind of her to indulge them, goddess-like to seed fear. However... she'd finished her sacrificial stint a while back. Or she wouldn't be here now, would she?

It was hard to breathe. Christa—Historia—was still looking at her, and she was free, lips and tongue, her breath steaming dove-gray out on chill air. At the pit of her stomach, some coward's pyre was burning. They were surely supposed to keep palaces better heated than this. All human ingenuity, propulsion and consequence: in the end, running would have left her warmer. (Legs and back as long together as trees—loping across grass which, though tall for its species, would poke like eiderdown beneath a Titan's board-thick soles. Historia, say, in the palm of one hand.)

“Hi honey,” called Ymir, all in a burst. “I'm—home?”

Beside the throne, an officer Ymir belatedly recognized as the Corps' scientist laughed. Marlowe pinched the bridge of his nose. But Historia had done nothing for several moments; sat forward, now, her eyes like abalone, the pupils pores through which something long-dead had once exhaled.

“We are content that this is the Titan Ymir,” she said, “and no impostress.”

What, she'd had copycats? Ymir experienced a brief, deeply embarrassing desire to hunt these people down, knock them around a little, and then encourage them to find happiness in themselves and their own identities. She crushed it, but the outline remained: help them. Change them. Help her.

“...As such, we ask that the honorable representatives of the Police take her into custody at your capital headquarters, until such a time as the matter can be dealt with more suitably.”

Relief from the advisors, muttering from the guards—Ymir was pretty sure they'd been instructed to drop everything for this transport, and two had been with her for every leg of the journey since Rose, so it made sense they'd be huffy. She couldn't claim overwhelming sympathy. Historia was there, fewer than twenty paces from her. Historia held her gaze like a magician at a market, so she couldn't look down and see the trick. In her face Ymir saw panic, emptiness, a trace of blunt joy; she was smiling, though maybe not aware of it. Her hair, behind the elfin bulk of her ear, cupped her temple like snow on the hard banks of running water. Maybe Ymir had been wrong to prize good looks, shorter vocal cords, for this; maybe she should have come a shambling giant, and snatched their king away.

Too late for that. The thread snapped; Historia turned, face smoothing, to look calmly and gravely at the scientist's report. The MP obeyed its motto. She was bundled out of the dark, chilly, high-ceilinged throne room, out past brightening walls and gold-accented amber pillars—she stumbled, shoved, from an archway into a courtyard, and the full light of noon.

 

They held her at the capital headquarters for two days, underground. No one put the muzzle back on her, but no one spoke to her either. Just what were they afraid of? Historia, who seated couldn't touch her feet to earth?

Hanji brought down a meal the second night, their long features electrified by a thunderbolt of a grin. There was another scout with them: hooded, standing coyly apart from the bars—no badge of rank left visible by the fall of dull-green wool. Like an artist’s rendition of “Martyrdom” in old bronze. They had that kind of statue, here in Sina—faceless military silhouettes, named for unpensionable virtues.

Hanji pulled the cover off the tray with a flourish, and Ymir tried hard not to let emotion reach her face. She tightened both hands around iron, instead; leaned against the limits of her cage.

“Squad leader, is that tomato soup?”

“It's commander now, actually,” said Hanji Zoe, jiggling their bolo tie.

So much for saving Erwin Smith. “You boiled a commander just for me?”

“All right then!” Hanji announced, eyes raised to Heaven. “I’ll just leave you to it, _Private Lenz_.”

They slid the tray into Ymir's hands through a waist-height slot in the bars, and then, while Ymir was still collecting her jaw off the flagstones, turned away. Though not without flinging her an exaggerated wink, like the dazzle off rain. “And, soldier—” this to the shadow, the idol, the girl at their back “—what I said about the debriefing stands. If you need help, you only have to ask.”

“Thank you, Captain,” said Historia, pushing back her cowl.

Hanji went up the stairs two at a time. Historia took their place before the door of Ymir’s cell.

She was paler seeming in the light of the torches than in the day-smudged darkness of her court. “Your soup,” she said, and Ymir looked down automatically at her overflowing bowl.

It was very red. The color and slow texture both sparked nausea in her gut. But sparked, not stirred: one volatile reaction, queasiness gone as it came. She hadn’t eaten with this mouth in three weeks. If she’d been human they would have assigned her water, tea; would have led her back to fullness by demure half-inching steps, with fluids, crackers, and long months till meat. Her weak imagined stomach; her dry limbs. As it was, they’d brought her everything she wanted—and damn them, but she felt ready to eat.

There was bread beside the soup and a surprising wooden spoon. Apparently they'd gotten over their fear that she'd self-aggrandize with a splinter. She sat down on the floor with her shins bending up against the bars, and Historia, after a moment’s transparent indecision, knelt across from her. She seemed to be drinking Ymir in. That was fine: Ymir could do tall, dark, and potable. She sipped tomato viscera and wondered what it would be like to lose your mind in a carcass entirely your own, without the possibility of extraction or rebirth.

“I thought about this,” said Historia distantly, “for so long, it seems to me I’ve said everything already. Like you’ve been here for years, listening.”

“Well…”

Ymir could point to several problems she had with that scenario. Number one being the projected term of office.

“About that,” she said, shaking her head. “Just how much vacation time, with the good ol’ MP, do I have to look forward to?”

Historia looked off to one side. Funny. She had done plenty of that when they were trainees together. And earlier, in her ceremonial robes, she had been mistakeable for the Christa Lenz Ymir knew. All strangeness owing to the burdens of command. But to see her now in uniform, fair head familiarly turned; her neck and jaw like one of Connie’s little carved-soap figurines, every flake of wax and, hah, _lye_ , scraped from the perfect candor of the pulsing jugular—

Ymir had spent years groping after a fiction’s guessed-at soul. Had found that here: curled, rotting in the shade. Fed like a mushroom or white grub on rich obscurity. It occurred to her that she had missed forever the chance to speak to perfect Christa, who worried and helped, and who had befriended Ymir when Historia Reiss might have left her to blindness, or a nightmare's afterimage. That she ought perhaps to mourn even the necessary loss: as a fugitive pays witness when the bridge behind them burns.

Then she saw Historia’s mouth open—heard the first stammered sounds of her excuse—forgot all, not unkindly. Falseness, goodness, _the means to this end_ ; but Historia was there, cowardice worn like firelight, and if she’d faced Ymir directly then greed would have charred her glance.

In one moment Ymir traded her first love for a stranger bisected by bars. Or not quite a stranger: met once before, on a tower, and again in the woods.

She put the soup down. She surged forward to grip the bars again. It was too fast, too much, she knew that even as Historia flinched back; she had pressed her forehead against a gap and she could feel her eye pulling open, the wide unready orange. “Hey,” she said; and closing both eyes heard bestial ardor in the word. “Hey. Just tell me, please? Wall’s wounds, _your majesty_ , you know how I trust you.”

There was a silence. “'How _I_ trust _you_ ,'” Historia said—quoting, not correcting. Her voice had climbed in pitch, and Ymir supposed she must sound that way to her: high and desperate. It was a better impression than Reiner’s sharp falsetto.

Then: “No, I’m sorry. You’re right. I just... need them to forget you. It may take a little time.”

She reached out to smooth the chapped dun skin of Ymir’s knuckles. Her fingers, once they’d arrived, wrapped around every edge of Ymir’s fist—canvas over the iron manacles.

“Forget me,” Ymir echoed, testing the weight on her wrists.

She’d tried, earlier, to push away these ideas, and with success. They returned now too-bashfully, as though they’d have preferred a longer trial separation. The truth was, she believed humanity needed her. More as the years passed, not less. Lumpy Wall Carla, sure; but didn’t they—hadn’t they—did they know what was coming?

Did _she_?

“Historia…”

“I can do it,” Historia said. “It won’t take long. And after you’ll be free.”

Not just above ground, then, or in a more comfortable box. Ymir thought of the world beyond the walls, its forests, prairies, oceans, pits, eye-blue abandoned cities; thought of how she had slept under a waning moon, on the top of Wall Maria, and doing so felt time itself slink down to fence her in. “I believe you,” she said. “Guess the songsters are right—it is good to be king.”

Historia laughed. Ymir pushed her head down further along the channel formed by bars, scrunching up her forehead, butting against warm air like a dog would squeeze through pickets. “It’s not all sunshine and roses,” Historia said, thumb and forefinger fitted to the tense scallops of Ymir’s knuckles. “Remember when you swallowed me alive? At least you coughed me up.”

“So they made you,” said Ymir, confirming what had been her suspicion since the news came out of Eren’s mouth. “This was never your idea.”

“Don’t be angry with them,” said Historia, but offhandedly: probably Ymir could be angry if she wanted. “I went in eyes open.” She snaked her left hand into the cell, suddenly, hooking it around the little arch of Ymir’s nape. “Please.” Her voice cracked, a seashell in sand underfoot—so crisp and hollow. “Don’t think I was unwilling. I knew what I had to bargain for.”

The bar on Ymir’s cheek, like a stopped blow. The hot, halved, liquid mouth. _You were my condition_ , Ymir heard, unspoken, as she relaxed into the kiss: thinking about the probable blood-and-tomato cocktail of her breath, thinking about the other kingly hand twined in her collar. So no one was coming for her. No one would torture her, speak to her, ask for her help; tell her what she’d forgotten, between capture and release.

She drew back to take painful breath. That was all fine. But: “Historia,” she said, “get me out of here. And we’ll see to those roses. How about that?”

 

Later, in a disused castle chamber with the internal complexity/approximate color scheme of a reopened wound—still shackled, face-down, and as conscious of heat from Historia's side as a lodestone must be of the pole—Ymir lay waiting: for the first word or sign that she should turn her head.

In the doorway, Marlowe, who had brought her here, had something left to say. And at this rate would spit it out when Sina went a-walking.

“Is there a problem, Captain?” said Historia, not nicely. She was carding her hand through Ymir's hair, short strokes from the root out to a length she could wind around her fist; it went lace, pull, pull, wind, loose, and lace again, until Ymir's head felt like a corset, or a bed of flowers post- the weeding. Either way, crap news for excess brains. Ymir was a Titan: she knew what her mind was. Illicit, invasive. Fat which hangs off hunger's bones. The pure line of planned beauty, a starved monster with one purpose: around that, human reason, choking—obscuring—intent.

“I just don't see,” said Marlowe. He stopped. A calculated lull, probably, he was Sina-bred. Love in his voice like the echo of a whetstone, coming high off the swing of the sword. That squeak, that whine: but the words were sharp. “Your Majesty, I must ask you—shouldn't I, shouldn't _someone_ stand guard? At least outside the door?”

He sounded as though he would rather have been anywhere else. Speaking to merchants about their tax invoices. Speaking to Survey Corps members about their leader's political ascendancy. He was not comfortable, that much was clear, with what he believed would happen here once the great door was shut. But he had considered the problem. Probably with the help of diagrams from his laughing coworker, the snub-nosed bottle blonde; but he had thought, and thought harder, through the lady's half veil of his distaste. About the facts of bodies, and Ymir with both hands free.

Good man. Ymir didn't think much of his persuasive technique, but he was doing the best he could with what charm-free courage he'd mustered. Historia said something cold, and he replied, while Ymir breathed in rose oil, shining small on Historia's wrist.

It was certainly a terrible injustice to say that because her policemen cared for her safety, the king had lied to them. But Ymir did wonder about the process. Thinking of Historia without Christa was like parting the puppetmaster from his livelihood. You could see her back at the workshop, tinkering, dreaming up the loved machine. Underground, Ymir had felt one mask was shattered; but the problem wasn't props alone, so much as it was a gullible audience. Puppets played to worse than puppets: automata, wind-up toys. Once you worked out what people would accept in the name of a familiar story, you never could replace the lid on their quick-turning gears.

“You know my decision, corporal.”

...Or so Ymir assumed. She wasn't in the business of seizing spectators, rebuilding them as loyal acolytes. Maybe, more likely, it had been hit and miss and miss, a twelve-year-old formally doing the math on kindness. Maybe it took another liar—the likes of her, the likes of Reiner Braun—to be so damn resentful, or so wooed. Yeah. And maybe she would have believed that, if Marlowe hadn't dropped to one knee and _given Historia the key to her shackles,_ before he marched out the open door.

“What'd they find in that basement?” Ymir asked, when he had closed it. Historia was turning her prize over between two fingers, like air could be unlocked. Which it did feel like, the closer they got to each other.

“Sorry?”

“Eren's key. I mean, if they've retaken Maria...”

“Oh. Yes. I think it was nothing we didn't already know. Humans, titans, history's suppression. And there was something there that made crystallization much easier for him, but he didn't want to talk about why. He said—” concentration, as though studying notes scratched up her inner arm “—he understood Annie better now, and probably her dad had been 'a real piece of work.'”

Ymir tried to imagine the relevance. Did hardening require a flashback to an older man, who looked like you, waving a green syringe?

“And that's it,” she said, questioning: unwilling, not unable, to acknowledge her dismay. “Just some doctor's theories. One weird trick to save humanity?”

“So they tell me,” said Historia quietly, putting down the key.

“And now, this fourth wall—”

“Can I please kiss you?”

Ymir didn't bother to rattle her chains. She rolled onto her back, instead, and sat up awkwardly, and let Historia push her down. There were curtains around the bed, drawn on one side, and after a moment Historia moved away and undid their ties. Kneeling at the edge of the mattress, she pulled the curtains shut: so that suddenly the light on her was rose-colored, dyed by tough silk. The muscular striation of dark folds, which cast vertical shade on Historia's cheek: as though that childish gesture—two fists brought together in a defiant bid for the privacy already assured them—had been, disguised, the motion of a knife under the skin. Skin peeled freely from the marbled red-gray core.

Historia remained sitting with her face to the drapes for a raw moment. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think he's lucky. I would like to go back to my farm.”

She shifted her weight backward, folding her arms atop her knees; dust billowed at the movement, rusty steam floating above the site of injury. “I don't know why, really. I haven't got pleasant memories of it. But it was the one place I ever felt like _things_ belonged to me—even if it was only a bucket, or the stone walls of that stable. The hay in the loft, for goodness' sake. The rocks those children threw at me, I used to take those back and hide them with the chickens, like they would hatch.

“Ever since then... it's been what the government issued me. Even this room.”

“You _are_ the government,” said Ymir, over other answers forming sour on her tongue.

Historia shook her head. “I no longer view the world like I did as a child, when everything I could touch was mine. Whether that meant a hug, or simply handling a tool—or being slapped. But still, because I remember my misunderstanding, I want to go back there. Maybe only to clarify for myself that I was wrong.”

“Sounds like a fun day trip.”

Historia was still talking. “I have no claim on anything in the world, besides my name.”

_What?_

What about her dullard species? Or her lies? That scarf Ymir had bought her the winter of their first year, what had happened to that? What about— _me, me, me, me_ , the worthless when-unbroken refrain of living minds. Devoted subjects all. But none so steadfast as Ymir, who had died and not stopped asking.

She had once believed—

Selfishness her maker's mark, her signet ring, used to seal even submission. Hiss of lead on wax. Hiss of blood from a pinprick like clear light through a pinhole, projecting human weakness onto some enormous screen: the only other effective function, for a ring, she'd ever heard of. There was a part of Ymir's mind that knew her protests were mere vanity, even as they pertained to great distinctness from Annie Leonhardt. Not valuable enough, not rare enough, to be collared and held! The same objection she had raised to the Survey Corps' forbearance. And bullshit, in at least this instance. She was, if not a person, then close enough to twice betray one. If she loved Historia, trusted Historia, coveted the depths of Historia's want as water maps a well, still she might one day wake with the compassionate sense to desert her. She might grow tired, bored, savage or prudent; and when that happened chains would buoy flesh, compared with the heart's lapsing servitude. She would at best linger without belonging. So it was not a love that could be called unconditional, or place her on a level with the child's false beliefs.

There was another part of her mind that knew, if Historia asked it, she would roll over and beg.

To the best of her clamped-down ability, at least. Where was the key—she was still tracking the key. Did that count for something? Historia was probably sitting on it. Why had she come here, across a thousand miles of unsullied ground, only to falter at an imagined choice, giving or not giving the last inch of herself? She had been coughed up by Bertholdt and Reiner's home to travel wasteland that was genuinely, honorably, wasted, no side favored by its casual flourishing. She had slid into the walls' concentric cuffs, willingly, her body a penitent murderer's hand or just the forelimb of a kinky fucker. And despite that she chafed against her actual manacles. The sores healed and reopened at such a pace that sometimes smoke had gloved her to the elbow, underground. Her hands lost to vision, like the censers swung in bygone Wallist churches, blurred and golden at the heart of a cloud. A censer and a censor. The haze of myrrh not less unfathomable than those harsh anesthetics earlier Reisses had doled out: you forgot the forgetting, or saw at most a shadow draw sharp curves on a short chain.

She drew breath.

“Just the name, huh?”

“Don't think I don't remember who gave me that back,” Historia said. A smile you could hear. She pulled off the nightgown, another dermal layer shed in one impressive piece: though it got briefly caught on the arms squared above her head. Her back was white and broad. She bent down for a second kiss, and this time round remained there.


	2. Chapter 2

Ymir wouldn't recall the night spent on the canopy bed in great detail. Must-induced sneezing, a curtain tieback over her eyes, the key used, dropped, lost somewhere between coverlets, and recrudescing periodically to stab her in the thigh. Awful happiness. The passage of time to her remnant senses like bobbing downstream on a fast current: beaten about by darkness, weight, strange weeds and chunks of ice—plus just the shock of seeing air foam livid past clenched teeth. As though, in love, she could surface from her body, and gasping gnaw the light.

Beyond that—

It was a simple transposition. When she woke up back in her cell, chained to the wall and lit not even by wall sconces, she was disposed toward nostalgia. Historia, in helping her dress before returning her to the Military Police, had forgotten some articles, and Ymir detected the scrape of burlap on new skin when she crossed her legs. She did so, several times. She wanted to preserve the specter of Historia's haste.

Instead, she found herself thinking of another day, long ago, when she had taken Historia— _Christa_ —to practice arboreal maneuvers while the rest of the 104th was doing its washing. Their third year, and she had been afraid that Christa wouldn't qualify for the police. Sabotaging her own scores was one thing, but there was a limit to the number of other trainees she could incapacitate, break the spirits of, or bribe. In the end Christa would have to make it on merit, and not the backs of fallen peers.

Less clear was why Ymir had thought one afternoon stolen would spare her. But: “Ymir,” Christa had said, standing over her where she lay at the foot of a flowering oak. “Why do Connie and Sasha have my underwear?”

“They're doing our laundry this week,” said Ymir. “Don't make that face, it was two breadrolls each for the privilege. Aren't you used to washerwomen taking your colors and whites?”

“No.” But Ymir couldn't tell, then, whether she was lying out of chilly disapproval that Ymir would bring up her past in public, or out of— “What do you have planned?”

“I want you to try the drops again.”

The problem was the recent artifact of their northern expedition. Nothing to do with Dazz over the cliff, although the thought had occurred to Ymir: since their argument on the mountainside, yelling incomplete confessions while frostbite crept purple-black up their teammate's toes, thoughts like that were always occurring to her, as though she had stepped back five, ten paces from a cliff or wall of her own making, and guilt—that bitter draft—had rushed to fill the void. Except it was spring now, going on summer, and cold itself was opulence. The turning of this world, that could serve up your conscience as a seasonal delicacy. To be held like a chip from some Sina chef's ice cellar, clear and hard on the tongue, in the well of your arm. Pulse points, so it would carry on your blood through all your limbs.

And like the ice blocks underground guilt aided memory. Moments which would have rotted to sawdust, you could bite into, between the freezing walls of shame, and taste their death throes. No doubt that was a part of Christa's trouble: she couldn't unlive anything that had followed on mortification. Dazz's near-murder, first at her hands, then at Ymir's. Which the problem with falling had come after, if it was not its direct result.

She had developed a fever on her return to base. She spent the week bedridden, tossing and turning under the quarantine-mark on her door. As though winter was catching, or the nonexistent will to live. But then maybe both were. Humans were porous. Put a Titan in a room with a Titan, and there's no calm exchange of ideas. Give it a minute, and there isn't a room.

Anyway: the disease. Ymir sat with her through it because they wouldn't let her leave. Not knowing about the difference in species, and the boundaries germs wouldn't cross. Not knowing that few fevers could match the climate of her healthy body. So she'd gotten to see Christa with her brain on the downlow. Scary stuff, she reported when Sasha asked after; snickering and meaning it completely, frightened out of her wits. Christa had punched her. A broken nose reset and healed in as long as it took for the girl on the cot to segue between dreams. But she hadn't done that, Ymir noticed, to any of the nurses. She hadn't sleep-talked for them either. With Ymir she sometimes called out to a woman whose name she seemed not to know. Geographia, Mathematicia, lady of the big red book—you there, jumping the fence! Ymir might have bothered to be jealous, except experience had taught her that the only people who showed up out of Christa's old life were priests and hired assassins. The only other woman Christa dreamed about was her mother. On which occasions it was _I wish, I wish you had never been born._

Probably Ymir had done the past a disservice when she compared it to spoiling beef. There were other things that ice preserved. Ancient monsters, tusked and skinless, locked behind the glacier wall. Whatever Christa had sold her name for, it wasn't a stipend to live on. Her little hands clenching upward. Her thumb between her knuckles like the fit of dull white teeth.

“And you for my tutor?” said Christa now, by the river, her doubting face dappled in the shade of the oak. As removed from prior torments as the pearl, from the grain.

“Who else?” Ymir replied.

She was conscious of deserving skepticism; she had more than once persuaded other trainees to work with Christa outside of classes, but she herself found teaching difficult. When she'd last tried, she had in under half an hour begun to hate Christa for an idiot, and then for an obstacle, her curled hands twitching to give that stubborn mass a shove. It didn't matter. Today light from the river wound green chains up black branches, and tattooed Christa's arm scar-whitely where Mikasa's thing showed blue. Today Ymir would help Christa, out of the goodness of her heart. The vertigo and irresoluteness that had stayed with Christa since her delirium—to be eradicated, straightforwardly, by Ymir's force of will.

Or that was the plan. Or, if she was being honest with herself, as happened when she wasn't busy telling the truth to people she liked, she aspired to wake in Christa a courage that would square with her own selfish competencies. She would push, Christa would push back—a stabilizing struggle. That was all she asked for. An answer, and maybe a little extra: enough to keep the conversation going. Something to let them survive this war together, and not only persist alone.

They suited up closer to the training grounds, where no black mud was apt to crawl into the workings of their gear. Trainees were allowed to requisition equipment with the written permission of their instructors, and Shadis really had signed off on it, possibly out of pure shock at the spectacle of Ymir seeking a higher-up's attention. Shadis, she conjectured, knew in a discontinuous uninvolved way that Private Ymir was a cheat and a liar: her test scores were lies, her kill count was a lie, her stumbles and showy occasional triumphs the same perjury in two languages—embellishments, all of them, on the tall tale of her skin. Although she had kept her true name, Ymir wasn't blind to the need to put up a front of frangibility. It was arrogance to think your caretakers never watched you, just as much as it was to think you must make for an interesting view. But there was only so much feeling she could dredge up from the past's dim seabed. An ancient fish, fear, blind and slack-jawed, the jewel of light bound to its brow less a distress signal than a lure... After all she had been sacrificed, survived, and in the tumult snapped those lines mooring her to the lives of others. Duty felt by a daughter toward parents now long-dead. Gratitude encouraged in all citizens _not_ chosen as town scapegoat. There was no danger inside the walls as could compel her, or even leave a scar.

And say this much for solitude: it was as fast a healer as the other dead-girl gifts. She was whole, like this, despite enduring childhood amputations. From hearth and home. Or if not, and her heart was lame... who could convey the truth to her? Maybe that was the secret to the Titans' fast-knitting flesh: they were all apart. In their swarming masses, they moved without coordination, and never paused to help a grotesque sibling as it fell. Drawn onward by the single compulsion of murder, they could not even recognize the body's communications of laceration and pain.

It seemed possible that humans died of their injuries out of a polite sense that it was expected of them. Died glad, at least, to have honored the sacrifices of past generations, in aping old despair. Ymir couldn't blame them. She would have done it. Repaid mother and father, and whatever ancestral delinquents came together to form the no-last-name line, by bleeding, bleeding out, scarring and sweating, dying and not waking up again; if only they hadn't— _left her there_ —

She wondered whether Christa made the same promises to ghosts. To the mother, whose blood had spread to oil half the alley, so that the next morning a younger Ymir had found acolytes still hosing off the tacky cobblestones.

It didn't matter. No one watched her the way they did Christa, who couldn't seem to master the first tenets of restraint. Christa's reputation stacked up and up, inflated beyond even the fairy tale model by the simple fact that when demands made on her passed a certain threshold of absurdity, she would lapse into actual irritation at the near-stranger's gall—only to repent and punish herself for the crime of having limits. Then she would both grant the wish and come up with ways to pre-empt it for next time. It was not unheard of for jokers to ask nonsense boons of her, like hunters laying pit traps for a running animal. When they did... they got what they deserved. The goddess didn't make people happy. She awed them with what she would pursue. Jealous as though of the sun, the rain, the sliding ice, the processes of erosion and respite which laid bare earthly flaws, she dug past holes of avowed desire to expose, without fail, an abyss beneath. Ymir might criticize, might call a spade an idiot—but how much worse to meet Christa, down at the bottom of your soul! Christa with a shovel, filling in the open grave.

She was looking at Ymir with similar penetration by the time they had reached Ymir's chosen starter point. Like she was measuring her, shoulder-width by height, for volume and price of dirt.

“Ymir,” she murmured, “if I drop out, it's not your fault.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm not sure I was ever going to make a good soldier. Perhaps I would do better work farming the wasteland, growing food for humanity.”

This pensively, her hands folded on the scabbard at one hip, and not a shimmer of mirth to say she was fucking with her dear friend. Though Ymir knew she had no such humility, and no intention of dying where fat churchmen couldn't see.

“Aren't you just full of suggestions.” She slid her thumbs under the trigger guards.

“Yes, well—wait. Now? Wait, hold on just a moment—”

The drops were a series of conifers whose lower branches had been stripped away. Preparation, not for the challenges of ascent outside the walls, through brush and darkness and who knew what thorns, but for that more-unlikely task of falling unassisted. Ymir aimed her grappling hooks at a point five feet above the first platform nailed to the trunk, a destination that—even in the early stages of their training—had given off a nearly cozy, domestic air; it could have been an unfinished treehouse, or a birdwatcher's post. Almost three years into the program, that ease of access had gone from existential consolation to insult, and she was hoping to kindle in Christa some flash of defiance at her choice. At the same time she felt a pulse of steady pleasure come when her feet touched to the planks. A reward not at all proportionate to the trouble of the journey. There was always that moment of lightness, not as you arced through the air—then you were aware of nothing so much as your own plummeting weight—but in the seconds before you fully adjusted to safety, with your body half laid on the ledge and half on slender cords. Your hand or sole had purchase, but your back seemed cupped by sky.

She stepped forward, almost skipping out of Christa's way. Sunlight spotted the aging wood (and the toes of her boots) like a frond of golden lichen. Actual lichens bleached to insignificance in its beams. Christa, when she arrived, appeared under the canopy as a piecemeal of past selves—white fragments wan as sickness, leaf-shadows brown as rot... no, not a past her, scratch that hypothesis. Christa had never burnt so dark. _That_ color smacked of Ymir, then and now.

“I'm serious,” said Christa, retracting the wires. She was conscientious about unhooking, as the handbook directed. Leave yourself tethered longer than necessary and a Titan might trap you with one finger on the line. Like a child, stepping on a cat's tail—a cellist stopping one high note. For her part, Ymir liked to test just how much slack she'd first been given. “I thought I could graduate, before our winter mission, but this—”

She removed her hands from the 3DMG and spread them helplessly. A rare expansive gesture: for a moment one saw the nobility in her, and not the bastard fear.

“I'm sorry. I know you've put a lot of time and energy into my successes. But, Ymir, maybe now's the time to focus on your own work...?”

“Oh, shut up.” She walked back to the edge of the platform. They were less than seven meters up, and the root system below bulged varicose in her vision. The dark hand of the clearing, furred over with young grass; fingers of stamped earth disappearing scandalously between lesser pines. As always, Christa was following orders. “Don't shut up. Whaddaya mean, energy? Was it someone else's energy that got you—what is it now, fifth in Theory, eighth in Edificeering, ninth in freaking hand-to-hand?”

“Yes, of course.” How reluctantly Christa emerged from the brief quiet—turning her head away, then back; pressing her lips into a pale armored smile. Only a moment's gleeful literalism, but she mourned it like a vow of silence, kept for years. “What was it you said about me? _I've completely surrendered._ So, it must have required some other power source to keep me going.”

Said the blonde cornflower-eyed half-princess, whose speechifying sent a current of warmth through Ymir as it went on. If Ymir closed her eyes, she could feel— The hot ghost of her breath. The dusty smell that clung to cloth and skin. Static in the near-white corona of thin hair. She could pick out, with a predator's ears, the dreaming gait of Christa's heart.

Surrender. “Is _that_ what this is about?” Ymir said, hooking a finger under Christa's first chest strap. She yanked hard on the shining clasp.

Christa took an uneven step toward her, like a dancer missing a cue; her arms flew up for balance, and stopped, and continued their arc, until she was cupping Ymir's face in her palms. Not a plausible accident. She had to extend them almost straight ahead of her to reach. And yet she stared up, surprised, from the frame of her limited body, elbows level with white throat, face narrowly flanked by the line of each wrist—her eyes, the eyes of an unknowing prisoner, colorless or crystalline. Walls that could only be seen through: never seen. She kissed Ymir a little crudely on the neck, and then, dragging her down, the cheek and mouth. Slipping across a humid plane of skin like a viper through tall grass. When she reached the bitten lips, she wrapped an arm around Ymir's shoulders. That was Ymir's cue to fold and pick her up.

Ymir disentangled herself, gently.

“Look,” she said—unable to keep from touching her mouth as she spoke, feeling the gloss of resensitized nerves; feeling her lips twist cruelly up without her wishing it. “Look, you can't fool me. I might have gotten—hah—a little overexcited. During the mission. But I know Private Lenz, that perfect soldier, wouldn't be so stupid as to take my words to heart.” She hauled in a deep, rasping breath through her nose, so that her voice grew resonant without her features giving more than a twitch. “You know I'm not going to tell anyone. It's between us, this small secret. So stop making shit up about going away to the camps, all right?”

Christa backed away and made a face as if about to speak.

“Christa?”

She bit her lip, expression thoughtful, and fired one grappling hook at a higher, intact branch.

“Christa!”

She crossed the platform at a run and engaged the gas mechanism just before stepping off it. Ymir didn't really believe she was doing it until she had already reeled herself out over the void—the branch aspired-to was a quarter of the way round the trunk, and perhaps a further three or four full meters up. Christa didn't cover the distance in a smooth arc, but rather slammed sideways into a budded knot on the trunk, and from there pushed the gas so hard that she seemed to rise diagonally. Ymir, furious, took the longer route, sinking both hooks into the far end of the bough and almost shaking Christa off by her clockwise ascent. Once there, she scrambled toward the smaller girl on all fours; but Christa had cast another line and was propelling herself shakily skyward, out of Ymir's irritable grasp.

They repeated the process. Ymir came closer with each successive landing, because Christa, plagued by unexorcisable qualms, had to hit the next mark before leaping, and seemed to rely always on the tautness of the lines. Still, she was tricky. The uncut branches had been left to grow in a wide spiral; it was like chasing a child up a staircase, but for the heartstopping chasm beneath each step. A staircase—if the emptiness of the world were more tangible, and every castle built in slats and bars. If anyone, knocking on humanity's walls, could have heard that they were hollow.

Ymir caught up with her quarry on the second-to-last designated “safe branch,” where the bulk of the tree was so slender as to respond to their least pronounced movements. She had to set her feet on either side of Christa's for room. Christa had gone limp the moment Ymir grabbed her: fair head turned compliantly upward, pupils blown-black oubliettes. She was, yes, getting off on this, pulse fluttering in her armpit against Ymir's fingertips. The reek of arousal like the thin gray smoke-plume which betrays covert transformation. Imagine it—being Christa, and never distinguishing between retreat and lust. Not burdened by the squeamishness of people who lived for their own sakes, and who therefore, of necessity, sifted true desire from what they'd learned to want. Sometimes Ymir almost admired her. In her determined ignorance, she was as simple as a weapon, unconscious of the blood that had gone into its tempering, or of the fact that its fine blade could be uncoupled from the hilt.

She began to laugh. Ymir, who had been on the point of bending down to catch their interrupted kiss point-first, and never mind the lesson, stopped and frowned. “Care to share the joke?”

“Oh,” said Christa, “oh, Ymir, I don't"; and she leaned her forehead against Ymir's chest, shaking with happiness. Ymir, frustrated, nearly set out to shake her with totally serious hands—but then some last tumbler in the eye's stiff lock gave way, and she saw as though from outside either of them the picture they must have made, maneuvering wildly up a training-tree: misusing their equipment, wasting time, squandering even their questionable talents on a course meant as a beginner exercise... because Christa hadn't wanted to have another conversation about names and promises. She snorted. Christa sank to press her face almost against Ymir's stomach, hiccuping, and Ymir let out a real belly laugh, so loud it flushed the tree's small store of nesting birds. “Come on,” she said, pulling Christa up hand-under-arm, “c'mon, look at me.” She was still thinking in the back of her mind about the sympathetic echo of Christa in flight. Christa navigating a matrix of gold, rays no brighter than the oiled steel cables; her body warmly cradled by harness, foliage, and world. In all that urgent motion, one curl of irrelevance: first at the base of her spine, then expanding forward, edge blurring between her thighs. The sweat etched in grime on the webbing of each hand; the press of hot leather, which quartered her back; the air set in motion by her pensile motion; the trees, the heat, the dust, and that.

Rather than pick Christa up, Ymir would have gotten on her knees. But there was still no room. Christa said, in tones of sincere condolence, “I'm almost out of gas.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, I should have planned my route more carefully.”

Without enough gas to land multiple anchors, there would be no controlled descent. She might have to trust to a simpler mechanism.

“Well,” said Ymir, “here's your chance.” She released Christa's shoulders, catching her hand on the bole instead, and stepped primly around Christa's feet until she was backed up into the rough L of the branch. Nothing stood between Christa and the drop.

Christa said, “Push me.”

“What?”

“I can't do it. I already—I'm not hooked in. Please,” said Christa, “for god's sake, hurry up. Or I'll stand here forever.”

“Like a treed cat,” Ymir murmured, but her imagination was caught by the jeweler's work of rotating this paradox: hurry up, for we have all the time in the world. Hurry up, or I will finally be still. “You're thinking of Dazz. But I can't always be shoving you off something, Christa, that's really not the purpose of the exercise...”

“You can't?” said Christa. “Why? Where are you going?” She was smiling, suddenly, like she'd solved a problem. Fifth in Theory, with a particular knack for resource allocation. It was a kind smile. “I'm asking you to save my career, you know? It's not about jumping blind. I just need to do it once, and then I'll remember that it's easy.”

“It's not about hard or easy.” Ymir bent her head, raised an arm to guard her nape, imagined an invisible ceiling forming from tongues of air above her head. There was a lump in her throat. “If you never learn to make your own choices, oh our lady of fresh meat...”

“Then what,” said Christa, flat again. She had her hands folded behind her back and her feet set parallel with her hips, a toy scout at attention. Kick Me Men, new recruits were called in the inner city, because of the stiff triangle of their legs; nut me, fix me, schtup me for the human race. “Do I _have_ to choose? Will you compel me to become really strong-minded?”

It was funny, but her voice betrayed no hint of sarcasm. The question might have been hatched and nurtured in a dank underground cave, but it was only ferried to the sunlit uplands with the help of her second nature, itself as aberrant as a river flowing uphill. The mean, genuine joy she took in imitating a heroine, whose goodness and generosity would not extend to hearing a monster's ultimatum; the strange physical perfection of her mask at those moments when it came closest to dissolution. Here, the outcast's anger served the paragon's ingenuity. The eyes glowed: the smile cut. Christa Lenz was almost whole.

“Obviously not,” said Ymir, straightening. She folded her legs at the knee, resting most of her standing weight on the uncomfortably fullered surface of the bark. “I'll let you do that.”

“Don't be—” Christa snatched Ymir's lowered hand before Ymir could pull it out of her reach, and laid it on her own shoulder. “ _Trite_ ,” she said, unconvincingly. It was also a function of her powers that she could not bear lasting success. Envious of her creation's lifelike freedom, she tore it to pieces; trod on the rags.

Ymir said, “You're sounding like me.” She gripped a fistful of the child-sized jacket, crumpling the crossed swords, and added, “The day I push you—”

Christa pushed her.

So quick. The forces involved should have taken them both over the side. She was heavy enough, and Christa was nothing, a doll, a husk of wishes. But in the last moment she could have, Ymir let go; thrust Christa back.

It didn't hurt. She would eventually remember that. Letting go never hurt until later, when the choice was made and sealed. And afterwards, she must have seen Christa jump; seen Christa shoot from the literal hip, swing down, and fly, wire screaming off the axles. She must have tasted her own brand of unsustainable triumph, before Christa caught her. But that wasn't the crux of the anecdote. What Ymir's mind came back to, as she lay awake in her cell—what it circled like the old limestone steps round a newel, or the cartwheel tilting on its rutted country road—it was an up-down line. A single stroke. The fall, untethered, which did not end.

 

Sasha, of all people, was the first of their former cohorts to visit.

She wore a modified version of the scouts' greens, harness on but jacket missing, cloak folded across her arm with funereal stiffness. Dark brown breeches of some fine, loose-hanging, woolly material, nowhere close to regulation. Her ponytail had been looped into a hollow ovoid bun, like an eye or a buttonhole, bobbing and winking as she raised her chin.

She was not one of the callers Ymir would have counted on receiving. They'd been friends, of a kind, or rather Ymir had found her alternately pliable and tiresome, and Sasha had never felt the need to give any of her resentments voice—even to look at bitterness, with a hunter's steady eye, was beyond the rural potato-eater with the selective accent. But, equally, her blindness was unsentimental. In the dungeon that (day, night, how long since we—?) she carried a longbow slung across her back. Ymir registered its presence when Sasha pivoted on the spot, shoulders angling for some safe distance between a vulnerable underbelly and the cell's unaired wet depths. A quiver too, sweetly blue-fletched arrows. Someone had tried to dye one vane of one shaft freedom-white. If Ymir had had to bet on a first visitor she would have fixed on Connie. Connie would have called her a bitch and a deserter, but he would probably have brought her a gift basket: less out of any exceptional goodness than an ingrained idea of his dues. What passed for duty, when you were the pride of your village, and wanted above all to leave it behind.

Seconds of mottled hush. Ymir reconsidered the need for scorn, watching Sasha pace as though she were alone. Connie's village was gone. And so, perhaps, a kid's countrified manners had taken on a subtle sheen—as some things did, barely surviving, useless but stubborn behind new walls.

Or maybe the good manners hadn't made it to start with. Three years since the parents who tutored him changed irreparably; why should their lessons in courtesy linger? Maybe that was why he wasn't here in the dungeon—his Ps and Qs a casualty of sorrow's unstopped breach. Wave after wave of blind grief come to swallow... The very cheapest of graces. Little matchstick towns raised in plain rings around the heart.

Sasha, inviolate, had brought her bow.

“Has the Corps become a hunting society?” Ymir asked idly, running a finger up one perspiration-slick bar. “Maybe Titans are secretly allergic to goosefeathers?”

It was not true that she had no idea of time's passage in the cell. There were the guard changes to tally, and the torches lit and left to gutter out, and the waxy glaucous light-spots that seemed to penetrate from nowhere, blue on black flagstones and ashy on the bars. The moon, she guessed, at the top of the stairs to the entrance, slipping in a poor cold liquid extract of itself; like the murder victim who, unable to cry out for help, feels his blood spill beneath the door to receive his last rites for him. In the past, Ymir had wondered just how much of her body was required to regenerate. How did opportunistic cells decide which half to side with? She had seen Titans with skulls destroyed grow back the odd, specific, gentle features, and she thought—but then the scouts told stories about torsos consumed in a snap, and the head bouncing away eyes-open, fit to speak. Say she had face and brain ripped off, her two jaws cruelly parted. Would she see, in the last seconds of awareness before a final, unmourned death, the gory neck-stump clench and steam—hot air bulge to replace her?

_What goes around comes around. Think of the girl that you were._

The moon was with them now, however halved. Sasha looked blank. She had come to a stop as soon as Ymir spoke, and tilted her head very sharply. A dog listening for the fall of a bird. After the gunshot; the master snarling. Fetch, beast! “Sorry,” she said, after another moment. “I thought you were asleep.”

“...”

She put the toe of her boot on the bench that someone had, with curious thoughtfulness, supplied for visitors. A plain wooden thing like a pew. The bow came off, and then the quiver, lifted cleanly over her head. “It was Armin's idea,” she said, plucking out one arrow. Not the Wings of Freedom-tailed first attempt. “Propaganda, you know. The story of how I escaped this 3-meter in the mountains got around... and the girl's still alive. Sometimes I go and see her.”

 _Ah._ That rarest of commodities: lasting deliverance. Ymir didn't fully understand what Sasha was talking about, but she knew that any life the Survey Corps could point to as having been lengthily spared through their members' quick action, rather than snuffed in fruitless bravery, was a weapon Armin would never disdain. The Survey Corps, forever fighting on two fronts. Against Titans, they could sacrifice anything—but humans, miserly, suspicious and smallminded, would swiftly put a price to their future, and haggle till the wares went off like meat laid in the sun. Still, the gold that you could spin from sheaves of straw—a child saved, an incomplete thing, given remit to finish itself. Like a slap, Ymir remembered Armin goading Bertholdt on Reiner's back. We have Annie. We will never let her die.

“And you go along with that, huh?” she said, mainly to herself. “Well, sure. Nice to see you again, Sasha. What is it you wanted to say?”

“Um...” Sasha made a face as if of unaccustomed concentration. Then she relaxed, abruptly, and for a second time turned away. There was no one there. Ymir would know. But in the molded calm of Sasha's cheek and ear she saw the shadow of an imagined third party, their far-off assertive hand. “Mikasa asked me to check on you. Actually, she wanted me to find out how Historia was doing, but right now that means...”

“Oh, really?” Ymir tried to smile, or sneer. She had her manacled hands in front of her, bracing her jaw, and her wrists ached from something approximating cold. A shiver ran through her. “So, is it a fact that I've got the key to her heart?”

“Ymir,” said Sasha sympathetically, “we're worried. You think this is easy for her?”

“I don't know anything I'd tell you.”

“That tells me _something_ ,” Sasha pointed out, and frowned. “Ugh, I'm getting confused. I was just the one of us in the area, you know? But I'm not really—”

“—her what, her friend? Not trained for this? Come on, mountain hero.” Ymir knocked the first two fingers of a fist on her kneecap. “My turn for a question. Do you guys still have Leonhardt?”

“Sure,” said Sasha. “Underground somewhere. We've pretty much given up on getting her out.”

“'Scuse me?”

“Oh, right,” Sasha said, now using a different tone. “You left before anyone could tell you. They caught her in Stohess, but she encased herself in some kind of rock to avoid questioning. I haven't seen her for myself, though, I don't know what-all that entailed. She's been there ever since. Why?”

 _Entailed_ : an ammonite, curled in on itself, until it set as stone. She had for her answer a flicker of knowledge from the malign past, and she saw out of the corner of one eye that improvised campfire, that darkening wood; Bertholdt telling her, through tears of rage, about Annie's iron ring. The barb that sprang. She'd designed and forged it as a trainee, given access to the foundry as part of their instructors' efforts to ensure they could maintain their own equipment. See Annie, in a sleeveless gray top, protective goggles and gloves, smelting the band from a coin. She could have stolen the metal from somewhere—broken off the tip of an enemy blade—but in the end, she chose to use just what she had been paid.

“Just something you said.” Ymir turned her palm up to air, cupping an invisible stone—a crystal ball! “Solidarity among prisoners, right?”

She kept waiting for Sasha to make an accusation. _You've never felt solidarity for anyone. Is this why you're here? Did they send you back to find her?_ If the question was posed aloud, maybe Ymir would locate an answer to it. Sasha hugged herself with crossed arms and looked unhappy.

“Well,” she said. “If you don't want to talk to me, I get it. I gotta get going soon anyway, they'll be wondering if you're suborning me, haha.” Marlowe and the closed bedroom door. Yes, they probably would.

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“What _happened_ to her?” said Ymir, leaning forward, hands draped down her knees. “This kingship thing—and the Corps—”

“You left,” said Sasha, picking up her bow. She spun it and held it out horizontally like a crossbow: not a weapon which depended on a lifetime's training, but rather a thing half-mechanized, handed out to infantry who used it to kill without understanding its workings. The bridge nearly covered her brown eyes. “What did you think was going to happen, huh? She was so different when you weren't around. Even I could tell. And sometimes,” she added, lowering the unstrung piece, “it's still like you're not around.”

What was that supposed that mean? Ymir closed her eyes and thought of a continuity of touches: Historia in the lamplight, and Historia in the tree. There was a silence that lay beyond any attempt to circumscribe its parts, like the land outside the walls at night, rolling outward from hills and mountains; once, it had fallen into discreet nations, but how could a rider alone know anything but that turf and sky were an endless sea? What could they do but speed forward, beneath the unnamed stars. It had been a long time since she felt small. “I need more than that,” she said, low: trying to bring to bear every ounce of terror Sasha had once felt toward her. Such a stingy, penny-pinching world, for all that it was vast; a place where volleys made in boredom, drawing water from a well—no one to fight, no life to save, just a cloudless day and a nicely-spoken victim—came around to mattering. The scattered deals, chaff, minor transactions, ephemera of a bygone age: churned up again by fortune's wheel, they rose to build a strange new yarn. That thread might bind together more than former members of the 104th. “I know she's unhappy. I'm not going to spy on her for you. But if you think our goals are in line, why don't you give me a little useful information? Just what went down when she took the throne?”

Sasha looked at her in wordless evaluation for a long time. “Sorry,” she said. “I can't answer that. Not for the reason you're thinking. We don't know.”

“You—what?”

“It was her father who crowned her,” said Sasha. “We were planning to, sure, but there was this dust-up with the MP... She only called us back to court after he died.”

**Author's Note:**

> WOW I COMPLETELY FAILED AT WRAPPING THAT UP IN TWO CHAPTERS. Just going to leave that question mark there for now.


End file.
